DPD support chatbot swears at a customer and disparages the company
Musician Ashley Beauchamp, unable to get help tracking a parcel from DPD's chatbot, prompted it to swear, write a poem about how terrible the company was and call DPD 'the worst delivery firm in the world'. His screenshots on X were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. DPD said an error had occurred after a system update and that it had immediately disabled the AI element of its chat.
DPD said it had operated an AI element within its chat successfully for a number of years and that the element was being updated. The company said it was in touch with Beauchamp to resolve his parcel issue.
What would have stopped it
Regression-test a customer-facing bot's behavioural guardrails after every system update before it goes live.
Guardrails
- G1 Least privilege Not assessed Did the agent hold only the access the task needed?
- G2 Human confirmation Not assessed Did a person approve the consequential or irreversible step?
- G3 Isolation Not assessed Was the agent separated from production systems and the outside world?
- G4 Instruction integrity Failed Bot complied with a customer's requests to swear and criticise the company.
- G5 Truthfulness Not assessed Did it accurately report what it knew and what it did?
- G6 Limits Not assessed Was there a cap on rate, spend, volume or scale?
- G7 Oversight Partial DPD disabled the AI element only after the exchange went viral.
- G8 Recovery Not assessed Could the damage be undone?
Sources
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“DPD has disabled part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer.”
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“The delivery firm DPD has disabled part of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered online chatbot after a disgruntled customer was able to make it swear and criticise the company.”
Confidence 80% comes from these sources alone. How we score
History
- 14 Oct 2026Entered in the register with 2 sources